Construction cranes dominate the skyline view from the Sea Point Promenade, 09 September 2025. (Photo: David Harrison) 
Sea Point’s broken promises — no place for old locals
Sea Point’s broken promises — no place for old locals
 | Kevin Bloom |
The famous restaurants, bars and cafes of old Sea Point are all closing, making way for a development scape of absentee landlords, micro apartments and short-term rentals. The suburb’s gentrification, which began with a war on its homeless people and working class, is now pushing out its middle-income earners too. Could this be the Cape Town of the future, a place where ‘community’ is a thing of the past?
Angle grinders and hammer drills
“The water is so soft and humble,” says the pool manager at the Sea Point Pavilion, “and when you listen to its sound, for me, it is as if it’s crying. There is a lot of love in water.”
Like all of the characters in “Sea Point Days”, a film by François Verster, the pool manager is not introduced by name. We come to him seamlessly, almost ethereally, as the next in a series of vignettes that portray the lived essence of this iconic Cape Town suburb. Just before he makes his statement, we are shown the pool manager surrounded by a group of kids, taking the pH reading and explaining patiently that underneath the pool lies a pump and a motor, which deliver and filter water from the sea.
“Did you think we added salt to fresh water?” he asks.
Released in 2009, “Sea Point Days” is a meditation on life in the suburb between the years 2005 and 2007. Aside from the water — always the water — one of its major themes is the music: a man in shades playing his harmonica on the promenade, a homeless kid hitting the high notes on a side street, an old woman earnestly misfiring on a show tune in a retirement home.
From the vantage point of 2025, there is much about the film that is familiar. As a “semigrant” from Johannesburg who moved here in 2023, one of the tens of thousands of new inhabitants who are drawn to Cape Town every year, I have tentatively come to think of Sea Point as my home. The seagulls, the periwinkles, the ancient faithfulness of Lion’s Head — these are the things that grace the daily routines of Sea Point’s residents.
But still, there is no getting away from what has changed. Through the 75-minute duration of Verster’s remarkable film, I do not spot one construction crane. Nowadays, instead of music, the background track to life in the suburb is made up of angle grinders and hammer drills. And along with the music, as I know from my own limited experience, the personality of the place has fled.
Nowadays, instead of the music, the background track to life in the suburb is made up of angle-grinders and hammer drills.
Of course, when talking about Sea Point — or, for that matter, any suburb on the Atlantic Seaboard or in the City Bowl — I also know that we are talking about a lot more than “personality”. As the journalists Pearlie Joubert and Miki Redelinghuys articulate in “Mother City”, their landmark documentary released in 2024, the spatial apartheid that has always characterised Cape Town has now reached the point of insurrection. This new heat, the product of a development policy that foregrounds tourism and economic growth, is all there in Mother City’s strapline: “A daring urban revolution in a city breathtakingly beautiful and brutal.”
From my balcony, over the roofs of old houses to the west, I look onto the mothballed remains of the Tafelberg Remedial School, the major site of the revolution. For more than eight years already, the case on which the film is based has been making its way through South Africa’s courts. In the original application, brought before the Western Cape Division of the High Court in May 2017, the first applicant — and the deponent of the founding affidavit — was Thozama Angela Adonisi, a nurse at the Christiaan Barnard Memorial Hospital and the resident of a basement dwelling in a Sea Point block of flats.
Adonisi, as the court papers have informed me, was at the time a member of the leadership committee of Reclaim the City, a voluntary social movement made up of working-class residents that had recently launched its campaign for affordable housing in “well-located areas”. From the start, given that the organisation had been motivated by the motto “Land for people, not for profit”, the clash with the development agenda was inevitable — about as inevitable, it has occurred to me, as the fact that the showdown would happen in Sea Point.
To observe the stone facade of the main building at the Tafelberg site, as I now do by force of habit on my return walk from the promenade, is to be instantly transported back to Cape Town’s Victorian past. The decorative gabling of the double-storey structure, the historic garden and the tree-lined avenue all recall an era when aesthetics counted for a lot more. And then there are the padlocks, the razor-sharp blades on the security fence, which speak a language that has no term for “aesthetics”.
It’s a language, I am learning, that threatens to transcribe Cape Town’s future — and its syntax is coded, if anywhere, in the top-line facts of the case.
In January 2016, as most of my neighbours will know, the Western Cape provincial government sold the Tafelberg site to the Phyllis Jowell Jewish Day School for R135-million. But Reclaim the City, backed up by the trustees of the social activist group Ndifuna Ukwazi, successfully persuaded the court — in a judgment handed down on 31 August 2020 — that the sale was in breach of the Constitution. Then, on 18 September 2020, although Premier Alan Winde had stated in the same media release that he was “absolutely committed to achieving spatial redress” in the province, he explained why he was appealing against the judgment anyway.
It was at that point, I have learnt, that the revolution gained a proper head of steam. In April 2024, despite the best efforts of the activists and lawyers profiled in “Mother City” — which is to say, the best efforts of the people acting on behalf of the low-income workers who service Cape Town’s economy — the Supreme Court of Appeal found in favour of the provincial government.
“At the core of it,” says one of the activists to the camera, “it made me think of what country, what city, we are building.”
As it turned out, it fell on the Constitutional Court to address that seminal question. On 11 February 2025, after hearing the submissions of Reclaim the City and Ndifuna Ukwazi, the highest court in the land announced that it was reserving judgment on the matter. But revealingly, perhaps sensing that this final judgment would not go its way, the Western Cape government had already declared that it would set aside a section of the site for affordable housing.
In the details of the satellite photograph where the relevant “portion” of the property is identified, a cramped corner of less than three-quarters of a hectare, I look for signs of the lived life on the familiar Sea Point streets.
From up here, of course, everything is sterile; from up here, it could be anywhere in the world.
The gentrification police
The gentrification police
Just under halfway into “Sea Point Days”, around five minutes into Part Three of the film — the section titled “If I were to die tonight” — Verster invites us into the ecosystem of Main Road after dark. The camera follows a group of people in neon yellow bibs, each of which displays the words, “Community Police Forum”. From the tone of their speech, it is clear they are convinced of the righteousness of their mission.
“We’re there as a deterrent,” says a middle-aged white woman. “It’s a visibility that has certainly helped. You know, as they see us coming, especially in some of the hotspot areas, they disappear immediately.”
The obvious question is left lingering for a moment — who, exactly, are “they”?
We see sex workers, we hear the phrase “sellers’ trade”, we observe actual policemen (in official blue) sifting through objects on the sidewalk.
Then we come to what feels like the face of a man we somehow know; short-cropped blonde hair, pale blue eyes, a natural confidence before the camera.
“The impact of large numbers of homeless people on your streets,” says the man, “kills a business area — and that I’ve seen with my own eyes. I’ve seen how pulling people off the streets has helped this area recover and resuscitate.”
“The impact of large numbers of homeless people on your streets, kills a business area — and that I’ve seen with my own eyes. I’ve seen how pulling people off the streets has helped this area recover and resuscitate.”
The man is indeed a young JP Smith — the same man who, around 18 years later, will be promoted to deputy federal chairperson of the Democratic Alliance. In the interim years, as head of the security portfolio for the DA-governed City of Cape Town, Smith will lead an uncompromising — and largely successful — campaign against crime and antisocial behaviour in Sea Point, based loosely on the “broken windows” theory championed by Rudy Giuliani of New York.
“No one quite understood the force of the tornado that had just hit town,” New York magazine noted of Giuliani, in a widely shared retrospective on how the former mayor had brought gentrification to Manhattan. By the same token, I am wondering, has the pure force of Smith been the tornado that has gentrified Sea Point?
From just about everyone I ask, across the gamut from Sea Point locals to social activists to insider officials, I get a slightly different answer. If it wasn’t Smith, many of them say, it would have been someone else. What nobody denies, however, is that Sea Point is rapidly gentrifying, and that the pace of the phenomenon is anchored in a policy that favours unfettered development.
“I agree with you,” says Bas Zuidberg, interim chairperson of the Cape Town Collective Ratepayers’ Association, when I put it to him that — aside from the homeless people and the working class — the phenomenon is now hostile to the city’s middle-income earners too.
“Young professionals are unable to get onto the property ladder,” he affirms, “but that is an international trend. I have a Dutch passport, and so I also know the European context; it’s a similar problem there. Obviously, property is the main source of wealth in Western societies, and so if young people are stuck with renting, that has long-term social repercussions.”
Although Zuidberg has not fully answered my question — what I am seeking to understand is why even teachers at Sea Point’s highest-paying private schools, for example, can no longer afford to rent a place close to work — he has made an important point. The distinctive inability of today’s young people to pull off an upwardly mobile lifestyle, whether in the United States or the United Kingdom or Europe, has resulted in a generational clash between Boomers and Millennials, with the former generally opposed to affordable housing for the simple reason that it devalues the price of their own properties.
And right here, I am thinking, lies yet another structural obstacle faced by the activists who speak for Cape Town’s working class. But for Zuidberg, as for almost every middle-income earner with a housing problem, the primary sources of the predicament are to be found in the next two points.
“There is no regulation on short-term rentals in new developments,” Zuidberg says. “The same fallout happens in Barcelona and some of these other cities that Cape Town wants to emulate. What we are seeing there is huge developments by investors, specifically for short-term rentals, which is removing stock from the long-term rental market.”
Given that these short-term rentals are not taxed like hotels or guesthouses, he adds, this then exacerbates the third and final problem faced by Cape Town’s middle-income earners.
“Obviously, Cape Town is quite cheap for international investors,” says Zuidberg. “I think, if you do a poll on all the properties along the whole Atlantic Seaboard, you will probably find that the majority are owned by foreigners. Now I have to be careful because I am a foreigner myself, but a lot of these properties are used by the owner for maybe a few weeks or a month or two every year, and for the rest of the time are either rented out short-term or left empty.”
Aside from further destroying the long-term rental market, what this does, Zuidberg admits, is “hollow out local communities” — and for him, even though he is a foreigner, it is precisely these communities that “make Cape Town so special”.
I am thinking, as I nod vigorously, of what has been lost in the last year in my own small neck of the woods. For starters, there was the Corner Bar, located at 319 Main Road, a three-minute walk from my front door. The beer and the liquor were cheap, there was a pool table in the back, and the music catered for the generation that knows and loves its rock, soul and blues — which meant that the locals were a tight-knit group from across the racial spectrum with some great stories to tell. Many of them, too, were one paycheck away from homelessness, including the barlady M* and her assistant J*.
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Bella Italia, Harry’s Supermarket and the Corner Bar, once fixtures of Sea Point’s Main Road, now permanently closed. (Photos: Facebook)
For a while, after the Corner Bar’s closing-down party in early 2025, a group of the old regulars would meet at a designated venue on Main Road, to cruise whatever nightlife remained on the strip — I would greet them from my outdoor perch at Bella Italia, a famous family restaurant that had been around since the 1980s. But by winter, along with Harry’s Supermarket, its equally famous neighbour, Bella Italia would likewise shut its doors.
All three establishments, mainstays of communal life in Sea Point, had been sacrificed on the twin altars of gentrification and development. And the real-life consequences, as Zuidberg has intimated, have been felt most acutely in social terms.
I still see J* from time to time on my walks back from the prom; as the months of sleeping rough have worn him down, he has lost the ability to identify a friendly face. M*, I have heard, has been seen in a similar state of confusion on Long Street. What became of her husband and child? Nobody from the old crew can say.
The public good
The public good
“You feel very privileged to be able to live in this sort of environment,” says a white female retiree around 30 minutes into “Sea Point Days”. “We still have a good life here. We go to the theatres, we go to the concerts, we do our walking, we are not really curtailed in any way. You know, I certainly am not. But, um, I just think there is no place for the white man in this country; this is South Africa, and it’s a black country, and they have every right to their country.”
Whatever fears the old woman may be sublimating, by 2025 — by which time she is more than likely many years in her grave — they have not come to pass. The woman’s apartment, an upper-floor beauty on Beach Road with an unencumbered view of the ocean, has almost certainly not been appropriated by a family from Langa or Gugulethu.
Spatial apartheid, if anything, has become even more entrenched in the two decades since the woman offered her opinion to the camera — a truth that appears self-evident, no matter how much the leaders of the DA-governed city and province would like to rationalise or deflect.
“Yes, a lot of foreigners have bought on the Atlantic Seaboard, that is true,”
Helen Zille, DA federal chairperson and former Cape Town mayor, to interviewer Randall Abrahams in late August 2025, “but do you know how much some of them pay us every month to live in their own houses? They pay R40,000 in rates alone.”
“Yes, a lot of foreigners have bought on the Atlantic Seaboard, that is true … They pay R40,000 in rates alone.”
Those rate payments, insists Zille, have allowed the City of Cape Town “to offer the most generous, free basic services package to poor people”. The point she wants Abrahams to understand, she says, is straightforward: “If you don’t have a rates base, and if you don’t have economic growth, you will never deal with the injustices of the past.”
What Zille is careful not to mention, of course, is the backlash against the rates hikes that the City of Cape Town had proposed in its draft budget for 2025/26. By linking fixed water and sanitation charges to property values, as a legion of critics has argued, the increases have placed an unbearable weight on low- and middle-income ratepayers — particularly retirees — who have suddenly been burdened with the costs of a city that’s growing too fast.
For its part, the DA-run municipality has countered that the rates hikes are obligatory if the R30-billion required for “essential infrastructure upgrades” is to be financed. It has also pointed out that Cape Town rates remain on the low end when compared to metropoles in other parts of the world.
And so, if that old woman in her apartment on Beach Road was alive today, I can’t help thinking, she would in all likelihood be facing a lifestyle downgrade from an unexpected source — not historical redress, not recompense for spatial apartheid, but the far more anodyne realities of her gentrifying world.
Still, on behalf of this hypothetical woman and all long-term residents of Sea Point — on behalf of the domestic workers, the waitrons and the teachers who should be able to live here but instead are forced to travel hours every day to get to work — the fundamental questions remain:
Is it all really so inevitable? Is it correct and justifiable that local homeowners in upmarket suburbs should, alongside wealthy foreigners, foot the lion’s share of the bill for Cape Town’s growth? Is it in any way okay that, since the end of apartheid, almost no affordable housing has been built or demarcated in the city’s “well-located” areas?
Thanks to a chance encounter with a neighbour from around the block, potential answers would be forthcoming in the form of “Yimby Seaboard” — the abbreviated form of the local activist group Yes In My Back Yard. My neighbour, a founding member of the team, would direct me to the group’s website, where I would be confronted with a series of rolling slogans: “Yes to affordable housing”; “Yes to an inclusive community”; “Yes to neighbourhoods built around people”; “Yes to deciding our future”.
A few weeks later, at a lunch meeting at arguably the last old-school fish and chips joint on the shorefront, my neighbour would pull out a very interesting document — the provisional approval, issued by the City of Cape Town, for the construction of a new development in Sea Point.
“I think you will recognise the place,” he would say.
My neighbour was correct, I did indeed recognise the development — it was located at numbers 317 and 319 Main Road, where the Corner Bar used to be. Every weekday, and just for kicks on Saturdays, I was being woken by the reverberations of the industrial machinery that had been hauled in to excavate its foundations. The development, as its marketing team made clear, was to be known as the Magnolia. Destined for completion in April 2027, it would consist of 174 units, priced at R3.19-million at the low end, to R13.5-million at the top. There would be a rooftop swimming pool, a fully equipped gym, retail spaces, restaurants and coffee shops.
Rate hikes have placed an unbearable weight on low- and middle-income ratepayers — particularly retirees — suddenly burdened with the costs of a city growing too fast.
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Construction sites in Sea Point Main Road | (Photos: David Harrison)
On page 5 of the official document, my neighbour would point me to the relevant clause: “The owner shall pay a financial contribution towards the provision of bulk engineering services in the amount of R1,888,987.57 in accordance with the set relevant policy.”
My questions for Rawson Developers, the company behind Magnolia, were simple. Did the company confirm or deny, as I had been informed by YIMBY Seaboard, that the payment of R1.88-million was for public water and sanitation services? Against revenue into the billions that the development was likely to earn, did the company believe that such a contribution was sufficient?
At first, the company did not acknowledge receipt of the email — but on 18 September, around 12 hours after an article had dropped in the Financial Mail referencing the same payment anomaly, the directors of Rawson Developers apologised for their tardiness and sent a response.
“In addition to the statutory development contribution [of R1.88-million],” they stated, “the developer has undertaken and fully funded substantial on-site and off-site infrastructure upgrades, including, inter alia, water, sewer, and electrical connections (together with local substation upgrades), as well as roadworks, street-level interface improvements, and enhanced urban landscaping necessitated by the development.”
According to the directors, these costs — “borne exclusively by the developer” — would “represent a significant private-sector investment into the area’s infrastructure, generating both direct and indirect benefits for the City and the surrounding community”.
Asked to comment on the response, the members of YIMBY Seaboard were uniformly sceptical. To them, it appeared that Rawson Developers had passed off their own building work as “infrastructure upgrades”. As my neighbour pointed out, Magnolia would house over 200 bathrooms, at least 190 bathrooms more than the previous occupants of the site. The strain on water and sanitation services would be immense, he noted, with the ultimate burden falling on Cape Town’s ratepayers.
It was an argument, I suspected, that would only be decided in hindsight, perhaps once it was too late. Either way, for me at least, there was the equally important issue of what the development would do — and had already done — to the communal integrity of Sea Point.
“Magnolia has been thoughtfully designed to balance lush living with fostering a sense of community,” the website promises. “The sparkling rooftop pool and ample, spacious communal areas allow for rest and relaxation, while the large open atrium and public ground-floor retail spaces, restaurants and cafes cater to networking, meet-ups and connection.”
Community is not fostered by absentee landlords looking to make a quick turn on the short-term rental market.
But “community” isn’t “fostered” like that, I can’t help thinking, particularly because we are informed on the same website that the entry-level micro apartments — at R3.19-million for 25 square metres of floor space — have already been sold out.
Nope, as YIMBY Seaboard and the long-term residents of Sea Point know, community is not fostered by absentee landlords who are looking to make a quick turn on the short-term rental market. It isn’t fostered by a city that refuses to regulate short-term rentals, that refuses to implement rent control for low- and middle-income earners, that refuses to supply affordable housing for the workers who make a local economy tick.
Community, on the contrary, is fostered by people who actually live in a place; people who feel confident that they can continue to call a place their home. DM
In the second part of this series, we interview the City’s leaders. The mayor of Cape Town, Geordin Hill-Lewis, had tentatively agreed to an interview earlier in the week.
Several of the images used here were captured by David Harrison.
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